Flesh and Bone: A Body Farm Novel

penis he still held in the forceps.

“Hmm,” I said.

What I didn’t say was that Jess was coming to my house for a drink and a steak in a couple of hours. As I rode the elevator down from the second floor and walked out of KPD, Art’s comment kept looping through my mind, and I couldn’t help wondering: Who was having whom for dinner to night? I found Jess intriguing, admirable, and exciting-she was smart, competent, confident, and funny, and she was good-looking, too: wavy auburn hair, green eyes, and a petite but athletic-looking build. But there was an edge to Jess that I found intimidating. I hadn’t dated in de cades, and the prospect of dating made me nervous even in the abstract. In the concrete-in the flesh, rather, of Jess Carter, who projected a take-no-prisoners toughness-the idea seemed downright perilous. Not so perilous, though, that I’d declined when she suggested I cook dinner for her. Just perilous enough, perhaps, to keep me on my toes. And according to Miranda, who was pretty smart herself, maybe it was time for a woman to keep me on my toes.

CHAPTER 5

THE WESTBOUND LANES OF Kingston Pike were as clogged as a fat man’s arteries as the late afternoon traffic crept into the bedroom community of Farragut. I reminded myself of the oath I’d taken years before-never never never go to Farragut between 3 P.M. and 7 P.M.-but deep down, I knew I had no choice today unless I wanted to find myself a new accountant.

I was on permanent probation with my accountant, and with plenty of cause. I was undoubtedly his worst client. For one thing, I tended to take a grocery bag full of receipts and deposit slips to his office every year around the first of April-early enough for me to feel virtuous, but far too late for him to have any hope of filing my tax return on time. For another, anytime he chastised me for sloppy record-keeping or dumb investments, I tended to say, “Don’t act smart with me; I used to change your diapers.”

My accountant was my son Jeff. His firm, Brockton amp; Associates, included two other CPAs and several seasonal tax accountants. They specialized in medical practices and rich physicians, so besides being his worst client, I was probably his poorest, too-a minor but meaningful distinction.

I’d arranged to drop off my grocery bag-two whole weeks earlier than usual-at Jeff’s house so I could piggyback a visit with his kids. My grandsons. Tyler was seven; Walker was five; both were rambunctious and confident little boys, unscathed enough to fling themselves at life unreservedly, certain that life stood ready to catch them with unfailing arms.

Tyler flung open the door for me. “Grandpa Bill! Grandpa Bill! Mom, Grandpa Bill’s here!” I set my paper bag down and scooped him up, and he hugged me hard. He felt warm and moist and smelled slightly nutty and pungent-that mix of clean sweat and fresh dirt little kids exude when they’ve been playing hard. Walker came tearing around the corner from the den and grabbed my legs, pinning me in place. He, too, felt and smelt like a busy boy. Both boys were wearing soccer uniforms, which explained the sweat and the dirt.

“Grandpa Bill, Grandpa Bill, I was playing Sonic and I got three more lives,” Walker said.

“Three more? Three is three-mendous,” I said. I had no idea what he meant, but if he was pleased, I was pleased.

He giggled. “Tree-mendous, silly.”

“Three is nothin’,” said Tyler. “I got seven.”

“Oh yeah? I got…I got seventy-seventy-seven,” said Walker.

“Did not. Besides, there ain’t no such number, poopy-breath.”

“Tyler Brockton,” came a warning voice from the kitchen. “Isn’t any such number. And no name-calling, or no computer.” Jeff’s wife Jenny appeared in the doorway holding a pizza box in one hand and a Diet Coke in the other. “Hey there,” she said. “We got in from a soccer match in Oak Ridge about two minutes ago. Will you eat some Big Ed’s with us?”

“Sure,” I said, “if there’s enough.”

“More than enough,” she said. “Jeff just called; he’s bogged down in some surgeon’s huge tax return-big surprise, huh? — so he probably won’t be home for a couple more hours. You can have his share. Walker, let go of Grandpa Bill’s legs so he can move. Tyler, you come help me set the table.”

I set Tyler down, and he staggered into the kitchen as if it required his last ounce of strength. Actually, considering the way boys tend to run hard until the moment they give out completely, that might have been the case.

Jenny moved around the kitchen with an easy, athletic grace. She had played soccer in both high school and college; she, not Jeff, was the parent who helped coach the kids’ teams. By training and trade, she was a graphic designer; she worked part-time, freelance, from an office over the garage. I’d seen some of her pieces-mostly corporate brochures, but some magazine ads and even a few album covers-and liked them. From a distance, they looked like thousands of other pieces of commercial art: children and dogs, perfect couples, rolling farmland in buttery light. But when you actually looked at them, something small and quirky always caught the eye and prompted a smile: a doggie treat in a kid’s mouth, a piece of corn wedged in a husband’s smile, a cow squirting out a fresh pie in one corner of the pasture. The deadpan humor was Jenny’s approach to life and marriage and motherhood, as best I could tell, and I knew it had been good for Jeff. Jenny loosened up the tidy, stuffy streak that allowed Jeff to spend two thousand hours a year happily adding and subtracting digits that represented other people’s money.

The pizza-extra cheese, extra pepperoni-had a thin but yeasty crust, dusted underneath with cornmeal. Big Ed’s Pizza had been an institution in the nearby town of Oak Ridge for as long as I’d been in Knoxville. It was housed in a cavernous, high-ceilinged building that dated back to the town’s Manhattan Project days, and it looked like the floors hadn’t been refinished, and possibly hadn’t been swept, since the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan. Big Ed himself had died a few years back, but his blocky caricature and his signature line-“I make my own dough”-remained on the job, as did the recipe for his memorable crust. The pizza was heavy, greasy, and extremely good. We ate fast and appreciatively.

“I haven’t seen your name in the paper lately,” Jenny said, taking a third slice. “Things pretty quiet in the seamy underbelly these days?”

“Things are never quiet in the seamy underbelly. Just quiet in the press, thank goodness.”

“What’s an underbelly?” asked Tyler.

“This is an underbelly,” I said, and reached down and tickled him.

“Where’s my underbelly?” Walker asked, so I tickled him, too.

I asked Jenny about her recent projects, which were safer dinnertime fodder than my work. The winter had been slow, but she had just landed a contract to design a collection of brochures and ads for UT, which was launching a billion-dollar fund-raising drive. “Be sure you use some good photos of my research subjects,” I said.

“I like it,” she mused. “Tell folks if they don’t pony up, this is the fate that awaits them. I think the money would roll right in.” Then she shared war stories from a photo shoot with the UT herd of dairy cattle. Apparently, getting that photo I’d seen of the rolling pastures and the pooping cow took multiple shoots. “Who’d have thought, with all those cows, it would take us a whole week and the magic of PhotoShop to get that pooping cow in the picture?”

“Poopy cow, poopy cow,” crowed Walker.

“You’re the poopy cow,” said Tyler.

“Huh-uh, you’re the poopy cow.”

“I hope,” I said, “we’re not having chocolate ice cream for dessert.”

“Ooooh,” said everyone.

Jenny finally hauled us back to civility. “Tyler, do you want to tell Grandpa Bill about the project you’re doing for school?”

“Sure,” he said. “It’s a PowerPoint about sea turtles.”

A PowerPoint? The kid was in second grade. I had tried making a PowerPoint presentation once, and I ended